"The emotional and physical pain my daughter is going through is something that no parent would want to bare [sic] witness too," Ebony Merritt wrote on GoFundMe. "My heart aches for the moment she has to look in the mirror at what these cruel individuals have done to her."

Merritt says her family is not financially prepared to pay for the initial hospital bills, skin graphs, plastic surgery and hospital visits. She's working to raise $100,000. As of Saturday morning, more than $22,000 had been successfully raised.